This guest post is by Sid of GeeksMakeMoney.
It has been a year now since an eventful day when I was browsing the Internet and clicked on an advertisement that seemed an obvious scam: Get 90% off a new iPad. “Yeah, right,” I thought. But I wanted to check it out anyway since I seemed to recall seeing the same ad previously, and I wondered if it was a new type of scam I should be aware of. As it turned out, it wasn’t a scam, just misleading advertising … and thus began my blog on penny auctions, which are a class of entertainment auctions.
I found the idea exciting enough to blog about. I was just getting interested in multi-player game theory and thought that auctions are a nice field to study. The problem was, I had no experience of problogging at all. Like so many others, all I previously had was a blog for my random musings but nothing serious. I had a very elementary knowledge of SEO which I gained working as a freelance writer. I knew nothing about how to rank well in Google or how to use backlinks effectively. As a writer, the only promotional tool I did know about was article marketing.
I started this blog in May 2010, and it’s been growing for one year now. Looking back, I have learned so much and there is still so much to learn. Here is my journey in a nutshell.
Blogspot is okay!
The thing that surprises people the most about my blog is that it is a Blogspot (or Blogger.com) blog. Yes, it is against the holy grail of problogging, but there is a very simple explanation—I didn’t know better! If I had waited to gain all the technical knowledge needed to have my own hosting, I know I would never have started, which would have been an even bigger mistake.
If I had a chance to create this blog all over again, I would of course choose WordPress and have my own hosting. That being said, I was just following the very fundamentals of blogging: sharing with others what I knew and what I thought. These details didn’t matter to me then.
Using Blogger is really convenient for me as I can spend almost all of my time writing posts instead of anything else. Since my primary purpose was just to share my thoughts rather than making money from the blog, Blogger was a natural choice. However, even now, it seems it isn’t as bad as it is made out to be!
The jump from blogging to problogging
No, I didn’t start the blog with the intention of making money from it. Truth be told, I didn’t even know how to at that time. I just started the blog because I felt intrigued by the niche I was blogging about and had a thing or two to share. I wouldn’t say I was passionate about the niche like a dog-lover is about his dog-related blog. However, I was certainly interested and curious and it was always a good learning experience.
The shift from blogging to pro-blogging for me was very gradual. As I saw more and more people visit my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to start monetizing the blog. As is common with beginners, I really had an information overload and didn’t really know where to start. The simplest was Google Adsense and I started off with it. Even now, I get about $100/month from one ad unit of Google Adsense on my blog although I have moved to better ways of monetization.
If you have a blog, you don’t need to monetize it immediately. You don’t even need to get started with that intention. It is true that it is all about the traffic. Once you build an authority in this area, there are a hundred ways to make money. The first step is not about making pennies and then dollars but about building an authority and brand that people look up to and trust.
Blogging in a new niche: advantages and disadvantages
When I started a year ago, there were very few blogs on penny auctions, if at all. There was just one famous forum on this topic and no well known blogs. This has plenty of advantages and disadvantages and it was a very different learning experience than blogging in Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, or other more common areas.
The biggest advantage that I can think of is the ease of ranking. When I started, I wrote a couple of general posts and then a strategy which would help people improve their winning chances on an auction. I didn’t have any backlinks to this post at all. It so happened that it was indexed and ranked within the first page of Google then (it would never happen today!) and I could see a small but steady stream of traffic. For me, without this initial encouragement, I would never have taken to problogging.
The biggest disadvantage was there was no community of bloggers. I couldn’t comment on related blogs, which is central to most other blogging success stories. Even today, I hardly know of five bloggers in my niche. Another disadvantage is that there is no precedent so you need to do your own research and take leaps of faith quite often. You do things that you think are right, which may be absurd for this particular industry. For example, when I first started banner advertising on my blog, I had no clue how to go about it or how to price them. I only learned through a series of failures, which looking back seem like obvious mistakes.
The importance of knowing how your niche is unique
I think it is very important to realize how your niche is unique and different from other niches. This is particularly so when you are blogging in a new area because there is ample scope to do things differently and be creative. Finally, it is all about creating value to readers and advertisers.
I figured out relatively early that there are plenty of new businesses opening up and they don’t have adequate ways to advertise except with Google Adwords. I gave them a very good alternative: advertise on my blog! I have had excellent advertiser feedback for the amount and quality of traffic my blog sends to their site, which is also why I charge more than what a blog in another niche would for the same amount of traffic. I also realized that featured blog posts, especially promotional ones with coupon codes are good both for my readers and my advertisers, so that was another area I was making money off.
It is very important to know what the readers of your niche are looking for and what the advertisers are looking for. By matching their two needs, you can create a good harmony and make good money off it in a sustainable fashion.
Knowing what to promote
Reading online about affiliate marketing, I wanted to enter the niche as well. Problem was, I didn’t have many products that I could promote. I found an ebook about winning penny auctions on ClickBank that I wanted to give a try, but I never liked the idea from the beginning—I thought my blog had superior information!
With time, I found some sites that gave me a percentage of sales that I make—CPA advertising. If my visitors registered at the site and bought a product, I would be rewarded. With experience, I figured out this would be the best way for me to make money from my blog and I was right. Today, more than half of my income comes from affiliate marketing but not from promoting a product but from promoting a website. Of course I need to be extremely careful that the site I promote is indeed good for my readers.
Earnings overview
In the end, I want to share with you my breakdown of earnings. As of now, I have three primary sources of money on my blog:
- Google Adsense: One ad unit near the header. For May, I made about $100 from this.
- Direct advertising: I contact advertisers directly and tell them how they can get value from my blog. I usually combine banners with featured blog posts (mostly coupon codes). For May, I made about $350 from this.
- Affiliate marketing: Out of a bunch of sites, I chose the one that I found the best fit for my readers. For the money of May, I made about $750 through this route.
Did you start blogging in a new niche? Do you run a Blogger blog as well? I would love to hear comments from you!
Sid is a freelance writer and blogger. He is one of the top Penny Auction Blogger and an expert in this niche. He is sharing his tips to Make Money Online and is the blogger at Geeks Make Money. He is always happy to connect to his readers through blog comments and ready to help those are beginning their journey online.
Thanks for sharing your story sid. I feel that blogs which were made a couple or 3 years ago got a good leverage as there wasn’t much competition. Now, suddenly everyone wants to blog somehow and hence new blogs and bloggers need to put in a lot of effort to make decent money from blogging.
Mani,
You are very right. We are always looking for the “next Facebook” and it is also the case in blogging or other online ventures. People who get on the bus early really have a gala time. Today, blogging about blogging or internet marketing is very hard as there are just too many blogs around. It does take effort to make good money today. That being said, if you are able to find a lucrative niche early on, that’s great too!
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it :)
Word. It’s getting harder than ever to make money blogging. As always, it’s the innovators that really do it!
Great article Sid! Very insightful information. Thanks.
Thanks Roger, I am glad you find it useful.
Now, this is very encouraging. Just cemented the idea that money comes naturally blogs with unique niche + good intentions + hard work.
Neil, you are very right. You can always start off a blog and write about what you like and what you are passionate about and the money part can always come later.
Thanks Sid for sharing your valuable views.I started with Blogger few months ago and i learned a lot from my journey so far.
Sumit, I am really glad that you found the information useful. That is the aim of any post, after all!
I still use blogger for one of my main blogs – I’ve kept it there since I also run community courses in learning how to blog and since those people are mostly just hobby bloggers I teach them Blogger as it’s much more user friendly when you start up. And I agree, it’s not as bad as everyone says – not as flexible obviously but much improved in recent years. Now that they have the easy option to convert it to your own domain but still blog through their platform I actually recommend it to my students, unless they want to get super-serious or have good computing skills already.
Amanda, that is so good to know! It is encouraging to see that people have Blogger blogs and appreciate the ease of blogging on that platform. If you are teaching people to blog, Blogger is certainly a very good starting point, I fully agree with you. At least for the beginners, I don’t think they should get too wrapped up in the technical nuances of a blog but instead enjoy the process of sharing information with the world. For these purposes, Blogger works great. Thanks for the comment and sharing your blog – it looks lovely :)
Thanks for a great post Sid. I think many bloggers miss the point when it comes to monetizing their blog properly. A lot of blogs I’ve seen are nothing more than ads and adsense, with very little content.
Value and content are the keys to a successful blog, whether it’s a WordPress or Blogger platform. It’s not about money, it’s about reaching out to others to provide value, the rest will follows.
Thanks again for your great insight!
Lori
Lori, thanks so much for your kind words. You are very right – people who start out blogging for the sole reason of making a quick buck online seldom succeed. The user experience and readers always come before the monetization part for a blog. After all, readers are looking for value, not advertisements.
This is something amazing, before jumping to WP i too was blogging under blogspot blog and truly speaking i did not had earned much but invest in my new hosting and now as like all other i’m on WP.
-Irfan
Irfan, thanks for the comment. You are right – if you are serious about making money online and that is your primary purpose, perhaps Blogger isn’t the best platform. That being said, it is certainly not the case that you cannot monetize a Blogger blog. Plus, as you rightly mentioned, you don’t need to invest money in the hosting.
Thanks for the article. A friend and I just started a niche blog last month and are also using Blogger. I could never find a ton of info on Blogger blog success stories with monetization so I’m glad you posted your story.
Glad to have helped with your search!
What a great story! I have heard that if you can make $1000 you can make $5000, so I’ll be waiting on your next post: from $1000 to $5000! lol.
Your insights into understanding your niche is something I’ve considered but never taken a considerable amount of time to think about. My niche is helping 9-to-5 employees become small business owners. Throughout I’m telling the story of becoming a small business owner.
I recently gave a friend of mine (who is starting a high-end jean company) the advice to take some time to figure out how you find and buy high end jeans and then think through how you can use those same tactics to help others. But I haven’t taken my own advice for my own blog!
Your article has me thinking about these things. Especially when you said, “I think it is very important to realize how your niche is unique and different from other niches…it is all about creating value to readers and advertisers.”
You’ve hit the nail on the head, and although I feel like I am offering products and services that will give my readers value, I have not been spending enough time thinking about whether that’s valuable or even connected to my unique niche.
Thanks again for this fantastic post. I’ll be thinking about it for awhile.
Alex, thanks so much for such a wonderful comment. I sure hope I can make it to $5000 some day. There are some ideas, but lets see :) I cannot accomplish this only through my current blog, so I am expanding into other areas. Hopefully I’ll see some success.
I am really glad that I could help you with a new line of thought for expanding your blog. Feel free to contact me personally too, if you need some brainstorming ideas! Every niche will bring something with itself. If you can track that and offer it to your readers, it is a perfect match. That is the way to get more visitors and make the existing ones stick as lifelong readers. You always need something to distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd.
Good luck with your blog!
ohh really g8 achievement on blogspot platform blog…
Yep, I also jumped into a new niche – by chance – and ended up with 200k hits in the first month. At one point I was making over £100 a day from just a couple of posts!
Obviously those stats weren’t sustainable as the competition soon arrived but the site is still going 3 years later!
So there definitely is a short cut to building a big blog fast, but getting in early is obviously much easier said than done.
200k hits the first month is amazing! You should certainly build up on that great initial start. You are right, you cannot maintain that momentum but you are already ahead of most people in that niche, so an early start certainly helps. Thanks for sharing!
I’m really impressed with your story… especially the fact that your blog was on blogspot! (Nothing personal against blogspot but… it’s not wordpress….) You just proved that everything isn’t about the platform you choose at the begining!
Marie, Thanks! Yea, like I said, if I knew then what I know now, I would have probably chosen WordPress. But in the end, it is all about the value your blog provides, so the major concern needs to be on that aspect of a blog. Thanks for dropping by.
I am really new in this area and as a matter of fact i am currently having a blogspot account for the moment…thanks for the insights Sid… ;-)
i make tv online but still i earn only 20$ per moth how i can make traffic to my blogger
I am not sure what the best method of monetization for such a blog is. I see lots of them use pop-up ads but you may not be able to do it as effectively with Blogger. Look for blogs similar to yours and see how they are monetizing the blogs and try to get more information on this.
Sid,
Thanks for the advice and information pertaining to blogger or blogspot blogs. I have been utilizing this aspect to make online stores and also work on my SEO skills.
I currently have 10-11 blogger mini sites that are doing OK with income. I have using blogger sites and use adsense to make profits while promoting affiliate products also on my blogs.
Yes it is a holy grail type offense to use blogger as a website, but I do not see any problems getting rated on Google AOL or yahoo with using blogger. The only problem is the .blogger and that can be covered up with BIT.LY.
Sid thanks for showing everyone about blogger.
Rory, I am glad to read your story. Your blog looks very nice as well. Blogger is certainly ok especially for beginners who want to focus on getting their thoughts out rather than get entangled in the more intricate technical details.
Thanks, Sid, for a nice guest post. I fully agree with your points, and in fact I maintain several Blogspot blogs for the exact same reason. When I run numerous smaller niches, I want my focus to be more on sharing what I find valuable rather than having lots of expensives running a multitude of minisites – and Blogger offers me the framework entirely free of charge.
And I agree with commenter Marie Noelle. It’s never the platform you chose, but the message you have to offer. The more valuable information will always win over any type of SEO etc.
Keep writing Sid. It was a real pleasure to read this. :-)
Henrik, thanks so much for your encouragement! I am really glad you found the article good and agree with what I had to say. You are also very right in this regard – if you want to start smaller blogs in many areas, you might want to spend more time writing posts than on maintaining them and paying for each of them. In fact, I have a bunch of smaller blogs too that don’t get a lot of traffic but I write them anyway, and they are all on Blogger!
Thank you. I’m a new blogger on Blogger.com, my site is all about the cooking recipes in MMO’s I make them in real life and blog about how to do it. There are a lot of blogs out there that deal with MMO’s. How to be a better player, strategies on encounters, group dynamics, you name it but none like mine. I find myself struggling to find common ground with these other MMO bloggers. I read cooking blogs also and find it really hard to go, “Great chocolate chip cookie recipe, check out my Toasted Smorc.” I feel like the center link that connect these two worlds but I don’t know how to connect them.
Niki,
I am not familiar with your niche, so I’ll only say that you need to see what works best for you. You know your readers better than anyone else, so you know what can work and what might not. If you think your personal recommendations hold value, look for awesome products and recommend them on your blog, which you would do even in the absence of a commission but now you get a small cut from the sales. Or if you think banner advertising/PPC advertising will work well, go for it.
Have a blog based on
blogspot is easy to use, but
until now I’m still having
trouble making money from
my blog. But this post made
me more enthusiasm for learning about blogs and
produce from its.
I am glad you think so! I wish you personal good luck in your endeavors.
inspiration to many blogger users and for the people using self hosted blogs too.
Himanshu, thanks, I am glad you think so! Self hosted bloggers are not “inferior” to their peers as they are often made out to be.
It’s so refreshing to see someone acknowledge that Blogger isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. Like you, I started a Blogger blog years ago, when I didn’t know any better, and was just anxious to get started. I found Blogger to be very user-friendly and intuitive.
I’ve customized my blog a lot over the years, but it remains on hosted Blogger … and it continues to make a very decent (and growing) income.
I still recommend Blogger to people who are new to blogging and want a platform that is very easy to use and won’t require hiring a web dev person to get off the ground.
I am glad that you agree with me! Blogger is certainly not as bad as people make it out to be, and is especially great for people new to blogging who want to get their thoughts and ideas across rather than spend them time in the technical nitty-gritty. It is great to see other bloggers making a good income on their Blogger blogs.
Thanks Sid. I think it’s good advice you gave to just get started rather than get too hung up on some of the technical issues or worrying about monetization too early.
For the newbies out there, I wouldn’t say that using WordPress is too hard. I use the Genesis Framework for WP (just like problogger.net does) and it’s really pretty simple. Thanks again.
Tom, thanks. You are right, it isn’t very hard but is certainly intimidating for beginners who have no clue in the world how websites are run and maintained. I know that was the case with me when I started blogging, though now I am much better off!
My Blogspot blog is less than a year old, consistently earns more than $1000 per month, and has for the past six months. My income is primarily from direct ads (mostly sponsored posts), plus a little from AdSense, the Amazon affiliate program, and selling my own ebooks.
David
David, that sounds like a very good income. Good luck growing your blog further!
Hi!
A very good article, I can find myself in it. I have started in February a blog that now is turning to be my first successful blog. It’s about 10 of other blogs in other niches I have already started, but never really started bringing serious traffic.
I have learned so far and is one of the most important things it that you need to write something about you like doing, independently of thinking making money with a blog. There are much better chances to be successful if you like your topic, not writing about someting that numers proof to be a good niche. There is almost always a way to monetize your chosen topic.
Cheers from Slovenia!
Great to see you identify with my situation! You are very right – you need to like what you are doing, and not think only of making money. If you don’t like what you are writing about, your chances of success are slim.
Hey Sid,
It sounds like you are doing very well with traffic and monetization. Keep up the good work my man.
I need to get on the advertising bandwagon.
Justin, thanks for the good words. Advertising is a good way to make money from the blog, plus it doesn’t depend on whether your users buy things or not, so it is the ‘fixed’ part of your blog income, and certainly worth exploring.
Hey Sid,
This is an awesome post, and nice pointers about the blogspot sphere still working well for you. I am glad people like you come here and share your experiences with us and being an inspiration for us. Hope you make much more out of your blog and come back and share your journey with all of us.
Praveen, thank you so much for the comment! I feel flattered you take me as an inspiration! I would love to share my story and progress in the future with everyone. If you are starting out, you can always contact me personally and I’ll be more than happy to help with anything. Good luck!
Thank you Sid for the personal reply. I will surely keep following you around :-)
yes one can earn through blogspot blogs too. It gives almost all the basic features needed for blogging.
I am a fairly new blogger with blogspot.com. And it is pretty easy the problem that I have, I guess has to do with Adsense by Google. They have chosen to disable me for invaild clicks, on my blogs. This is so disheartning to me because I find this to be false on my part. I have never clicked on my own ads nor has anyone that I know personally tried to defraud. Of course I do not know everyone who has visited my site, but I am an innocent party. I just want to blog. I enjoy it and others also enjoy my blogs. This has somewhat taken the pleasure away from me. But I will not give up on blogging and trying to make it an income for myself. If any one have any ideas please feel free to email me at [email protected] and please feel free to visit my blog at comingintoonesown http://reinventionandfulfillment.blogspot.com
Don’t rely solely on Adsense. It is a great starter, but there are also many alternatives. If you have a problem with Adsense, get the dozens of alternatives. There is no one way only to make money with your blog.
Also, consider visiting the Adsense forum and posting your problem. Posters there are good and friendly and they may give you specialized advice to your case.
I’ve used Blogger ever since 2005 for two main blogs that I wrote. My revenue came from direct advertising, AdSense and affiliate ads and links. While there are definitely some limitations to what you can do with Blogger, I’ve found that the templates are highly customizable (if you know a thing or two about XML and HTML) and you can accomplish a lot of what you need.
I’ve been fortunate to have made a few hundred dollars with AdSense in the last 2 years but the main source of income has been product tie-ins to my affiliate accounts.
I don’t have a product of my own (yet) but am considering e-books in my future. I generally review actual products related to my blog (homebrewing beer) and have racked up several thousand dollars in sales for my affiliates. I get a 10% cut on all sales that I generate from my blog.
So in four years I’ve made nearly $2000 on my Blogspot blog and the last $600 of that has been off of articles that I wrote over a year ago. Writing good pillar articles and keeping that information current helps bring in revenue without any extra effort.
Sure, my old blog doesn’t have any new articles for the last year but it still generates over $1000 a year. I’ve learned a lot from ProBlogger over the last few years and it’s starting to pay off. Now I’m wishing I hadn’t taken a year off to focus on my “day job” exclusively because I know I could have made significantly more revenue.
So don’t write off Blogspot (blogger) blogs as an absolute no-no. You can and will make money with them, but you will need to do a lot of work up front to get your blog to look the way you want.
Dave, thanks for sharing your wonderful story! You are right – with good pillar articles, you can get a good amount of traffic and also generate sales even if you no longer actively blog.
I hope this is encouraging to those that have never had a website. It just goes to show that you don’t need to start out on WordPress and have a fancy theme. If you have good content, it doesn’t matter the platform.
Thanks Mari, I am glad you agree. Today, there are plenty of free options even for people with little or no technical knowledge, so there is no excuse not to get started!
That’s great Sid. I think your article really shows the advantage of going into an under-utilized niche rather than one that is constantly growing with new blogs like travel or backpacking. Every person that takes a trip starts a new blog, but every person that wants to win a penny auction probably finds their way to yours.
Thanks! It is really nice to blog in an under-utilized niche and it is a very different learning experience as well. I hope to write my next post on the pros and cons of doing this – yea, it is not all a bed of roses either! You are right, if you can get to the top of an niche, even if you are not mainstream like traveling or blogging, you can get a good chunk of readers.
I also have a blogspot blog, although I recently bought my own domain, so blogspot is not in the url anymore. I started with blogspot for the same reason as you and have been very happy with it. I also have a very unique niche. My blog is “Connect with your Teens through Pop Culture and Technology”. Almost all blogs about parents and teens are either about dealing with the problems or else they are personal blogs. Mine is a blog that helps parents stay up to date with pop culture, technology and other teen interests as a way of better connecting to their teens. My problem as to communities is that I have many communities of bloggers that have some aspects in common with my blog, but none that are the same niche. As you said, it is good and bad. Most of my money has come from adsense, Amazon (most of it during November and December) and sponsored posts. I haven’t had success as an affiliate but maybe I haven’t found the right products. Thanks for your post. I would love more advice on what you mean by affiliate websites.
Jennifer, it is great to meet other bloggers with a similar story with respect to their blogging origins, so glad to see your comment! Your niche seems nice and unique too. You are right – there are many pros and cons to this. I am guessing Amazon affiliates should help you as you can market products (music products in your case) directly to people.
I personally don’t know good affiliate products in this niche, but you should definitely hunt for them. What I mean by affiliate websites are those that pay me a certain % of lifetime/one time money spent by my referrers. It is not a product per se, i.e. they don’t buy a product but they buy a ‘set of bids’ to get started with bidding (in my niche). Again, you should look for information that is unique to your niche – I am sure you can find some good products. And yea, just give it a try and learn from there – nothing like teaching yourself. Good luck!
Thanks for the great advice.
This is one of the best posts I have read here so far! We beginners are intimidated by so much of the fancy advice that is available everywhere. Plus, the Gurus are really up in the sky and we find them hard to reach. Such inspirational success stories are indeed the ones we can relate to. Hope to read more of your posts on Problogger in the future.
I was trying to get similar results but I failed but I have achieved more than that with self hosted wordpress.
Congrats. All the best to make more money :)
That is usually the case, yes. However, in the end the purpose of the blog is not to be hosted on a good domain but to provide the most value to the readers, however you are able to achieve it. WordPress perhaps gives you better opportunities but Blogger isn’t too bad either!
Hi Sid,
Thank you for the insight. I started in Blogger also and it is easy to use. But I still believe that when you have the confidence in blogging you need to have your own self hosting site.
All the best.
You are right, but what if you started in Blogger and that blog takes off? That was what happened to me.
I still recommend Blogger to people who are new to blogging and want a platform that is very easy to use and won’t require hiring a web dev person to get off the ground.
Many ways to successful blogging. But what you are doing really is interesting. Mastery of a niche (or a particular topic) is very necessary. This can be a big capital to achieve success.
There is other blogger who previously was a famous football player. After stopping the player, he’s blogging with niche training to be a top player. He was finally successful: it could make a lot of money from his blog.
I think a lot of people who already have special skills or abilities, can replicate your steps. If they now do not have, can learn how to have it. Any topic. I am very pleased with your article. Thank you.
Thanks Minka. Being a big player in a niche is a huge plus and can help the blog become really popular (like Problogger is!) My niche is relatively much smaller but it is still a great experience knowing you are one of the more popular blogs around.
Your experience story is very good friends. Your experience that you wrote above, opened my eyes about doing business on the blog. Honestly, I’m the opposite of your experience. I created a blog with the main purpose of generating dollars. I do not care whether the bog I have a lot of visitors or not. Although my blog was only one day or less, I immediately put an ad from google adsense. And the result?
Not at all encouraging. My google adsense’s balance is $ 0.
From your experience, I can learn many things about blogging. I need to learn a lot from you.
Thank you friends.
I am glad it helped. If you are passionate and interested in what you blog about, the money will flow. Good luck with your blogging efforts!
Wow… same as you when I was starting to blog, I didn’t think that I will gain money from it. I’m from Indonesia, and my first language is Bahasa Indonesia. So my aim to blog is to improve my English skill not for money but my friends asking me to register some site, so blog for money was starting. I was so diligent in blogging because of some pennies and till now. I haven’t get good amount that can count as money pocket, hahahaha… but blogging is better than game for me, i think.
That’s actually a very good reason for starting a blogger blog which I should have probably mentioned. If your reason for blogging isn’t primarily money, then it is quite alright to use Blogger. With time, perhaps you can monetize it for a few dollars and it probably still is better than having your own hosting and other technical learning that comes with it.
Well I have a personal website and I’ve had it for 10 months, but I guess personal website are not good for making money. I make very little money, but I’m really not sure what I’m doing anyway. I guess if I knew better how to attract advertisers that would help, but I was told by several people that the advertiser would find me if my blog got popular enough. I only average about 135,000 hits per month, so maybe I just need to find a way to get more readers.
John,
It is hard to know how much is good and I cringe every time someone says “you need xxx,xxx visitors to make money”. No, that is not how it works. Personally, my penny auction blog that I wrote about, got about 11,000 visitors last month. That is less than 10% of your traffic! Now I am not saying you would earn 10 times what I do, but I am only saying that you have good enough traffic if you want to monetize it.
Your blog is personal, but I think you can have a little bit of travel related information as well. Look for the various options and see your blog more thoroughly to find areas that will be easy to monetize. Advertisers finding you is tough unless you are Darren Rowse already! You are always welcome to contact me personally if you need any ideas/help/suggestions/anything else!
Hi Sid,
I also started with a blogspot blog (still on blogger with custom domain- about 14months old) that makes me $1500 monthly from advertising (70% adsense) with up to 5000 subscribers. I have a WP blog now, thanks to my first blog. I recommend blogger.com for new bloggers anyday anytime.
Thanks for sharing
Ikenna
Yes, Im happy to hear that you are on Blogger, I do template for blogger and I encourage anyone to start with a Blogger blog.
Its true, WordPress is powerful, but not at all need the power of WordPress.
Great tips! Very valuable for me, thank you.
Thanks for the post.I still use blogger from may 2010 and think to jump to WP…
My primary blog is still under the Blogspot domain. And yes, I’m currently on the point when I told myself that I should have started my blog on a self-hosted WordPress. But I didn’t know anything about WordPress that time so Blogger was my only choice.
I started last August 2010 and looking back, I had fun having Blogger to host my blog. Plus, I love the community. But as they said, you couldn’t be a problogger using Blogger. Let’s see…
Regarding your achievements, I congratulate you. Good job!
I wish people would be honest and admit that they started their blog to either be famous or to make money. I’m so sick of all the, I just started blogging randomly as a fun hobby.” claim. Blogging is not fun enough to do just for recreation, in fact, it’s seriously boring and dull. And if blogging is actually fun for you, then you need to get out more, seriously. Otherwise stop misleading people.
You couldn’t be more wrong than this and it shows you have no idea of blogging outside what you see. I know millions of personal blogs that have no intention of ever making money. Lots of my blogs are the same – I would never ever want to make a buck from them. There are other blogs that are made for money. If blogging isn’t fun for you, I would seriously recommend you to reconsider working on it. A 9-5 job is a good alternative to make money. Blogging certainly isn’t for everyone.
I use blogger to run my blog. The only issue that I have with my blog is that it is in a niche that is not unique, but I love the industry so much, and I am willing to really reach out to people.
I only make $10 or less a month on Adsense (but I get free products and services and stuff from companies, so that still counts as non-cash revenue).
I’m just happy that I have a few people that are interested in my blog. Blogging is something I really love doing, and I hope that one day I will come out with a post that interests even more people.
That is very good to know! If you like something, don’t stop for anything – forget about the competition and just concentrate on providing the best value to your readers. With time, you will gain ranking and everything that comes along with good blogs. Perhaps some good SEO research with respect to keywords might help as well. With time, you can always look for better monetization tools than Adsense if available in your niche.
Hi Sid, thanks for the sharing! It’s an inspiring story of yours in making it through in blogging. I do have a few blogger blog and currently monetizing it. But at times i felt guilty of over doing it! Hehe
All the best in your future venture.
Cheers!
I am not a new comer – I have been blogging for 2 years now mostly in Self hosted WP. While WP is a great platform, when I had a choice for selecting a platform for a blog in a new niche mostly focused on affiliate marketing, I chose blogger. I just love the Blogger’s Amazon Affiliate integration. It makes life easy for people who need to constantly put up affiliate links. I can also add ads if I want, in future. Besides, its easy to buy a domain from blogger and host it for free there. Why haven’t you bought a custom domain? I think blogs with custom domain get more search engine traffic and the recollection factor in peoples minds is also higher.
Destination Infinity
Surprisingly, I have heard some very good things about Blogger. Although I have always used WordPress for all my personal and client sides. I find that initial investment in hosting and the flexibility that it provides can save a lot of headaches later on. I have had to help several clients in migrating from blogger/wordpress to self hosting and it is a pain.